Intel Core i5 12600K / Core i9 12900K "Alder Lake" Linux Performance

[sophisticles]

I don't see the source of excitement. Yes, it is ultimately a good thing that intel finally has something competitive, as amd offerings are diminishing in purchase value due to the increase of their margins... due to lack of competition.

But it is actually a tad sad that intel needs DOUBLE the power and DOUBLE the ram bandwidth to catch up to zen, and in light workloads only, while still falling behind in the heavy and time consuming ones, which I dare say are far more important than some intangible fps improvement.

Intel had to push this sucka well beyond its energy sweetspot, butchering its efficiency in the process, all to come out a bit on top, making the whole thing seem but a pyrrhic victory. But it still counts to all those demented fanbois, they don't care about reason after all.

All in all, amd will most likely handle that with the vcache refresh of ryzen 3, and will still have the ddr5 card to play next year with zen 4. So intel better have a lot more improvements in store, because it will need them. Especially in the far more lucrative enterprise market, where power efficiency matters.

I don't know what you're on about but if you leave Phoronix and look at other benchmarks, you will see that you are very mistaken. Check out Puget Systems' reviews to see what Alder Lake is capable of,

[nikslor]

Speaking of p- vs e-cores, here's in depth coverage from computerbase.de:

https://www.computerbase.de/2021-11/intel-core-i9-12900k-i7-12700k-i5-12600k-test/2/

It's quite dense German text but Google Translate probably can manage it.

deepl.com is the new cool kid on the block regarding translations - give it a try if you have a few minutes; for me it works better in most cases.

[bridgman]

<performance chart for SPECint2017_r1 / SPECfp2017_r1>

The Apple M1 has only a BIG.little core design, with 4 BIG cores and 4 little cores. No hyperthread and no turbo gimmicks. Here is the anandtech article where the confrontation against x86 is incredible. I'm not an Apple fan at all, but looking at those benchmarks it looks like x86 days seems over.
And look at the power usage: 25 Watts, 1/10 (one tenth) of the power draw of this Intel crap!

At the risk of asking a dumb question, isn't this a single-thread performance comparison ? How is the number of cores/threads relevant ?

The next page of the article you linked is probably more relevant - multi-core numbers against x86 parts designed to operate in a similar power range:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252...le-m1-tested/5

The M1 ends up between a 15W x86 and a 35W x86 (AMD 4800U and 4900HS respectively) although the M1's FP numbers were actually better than the 35W part.

[numacross]

The Apple M1 has only a BIG.little core design, with 4 BIG cores and 4 little cores. No hyperthread and no turbo gimmicks. Here is the anandtech article where the confrontation against x86 is incredible. I'm not an Apple fan at all, but looking at those benchmarks it looks like x86 days seems over.
And look at the power usage: 25 Watts, 1/10 (one tenth) of the power draw of this Intel crap!

The M1 Pro and Max do have Turbo for the big cores. I do not say they are not impressive, far from it, but they have a node advantage over AMD and Intel, because of the second generation 5nm TSMC process (vs. 7nm TSMC for AMD and Intel 7, formerly 10ESF).
As for x86 days being over, a recent interview on AnandTech makes some great points about the relevancy of ISA wars to core design. Basically Zen was designed in tandem with an ARM core and the ISA has far lesser impact on microarchitectual design than people give it credit for.

[blackshard]

Well... probably because M1 has Turbo, Performance Cores, Energy Efficient Cores and a whole lot of specialized hardware acceleration. They are also extremely wide when compared to other designs (8 vs. ADL's 6 or Zen's 4). Second generation 5nm process also helps with fitting 57bn transistors (RTX 3090 has 28,3bn for comparison) in a small package.

Yet looking at more standardized benchmarks like SPEC M1 loses in absolute performance to both ADL and Zen 3. The energy efficiency is extremely good, however:

The Apple M1 has only a BIG.little core design, with 4 BIG cores and 4 little cores. No hyperthread and no turbo gimmicks. Here is the anandtech article where the confrontation against x86 is incredible. I'm not an Apple fan at all, but looking at those benchmarks it looks like x86 days seems over.
And look at the power usage: 25 Watts, 1/10 (one tenth) of the power draw of this Intel crap!

[sdack]

You are either too young to remember, or too ignorant to acknowledge AMD's history with regards to x86.

You are still only trying to compare Intel to Monsanto. You never "discussed" it. You only insinuated it.

[drakonas777]

So, having read quite a lot of reviews here are some pertinent and important conclusions:

• Intel has pushed their P-cores for MT scenarios to extremes to be the absolute performance king and at least be faster than 5900X and rival 5950X in many cases. This results in an insane power consumption out of the box but only for heavy MT tasks, e.g. video encoding, rendering, software compilation, math calculations - not something average people do daily.
• This extreme power consumption does not translate into every day scenarios like modestly threaded applications or games - in fact many reviewers show that ADL CPUs are the most power efficient in games. Igor's Lab, AnandTech and computerbase.de have shown that limiting their TDP to 125W or even lower does not meaningfully affect frame rates.
• It seems very likely that if P-cores maximum frequency is decreased by just 200-300MHz their efficiency will be incredible.
• Factory OC'ing is not new and NVIDIA, AMD, Apple have been doing that for at least a couple of years. No one is crying foul because of that.

TLDR: Overall ADL CPUs are great sans an extreme factory OC for heavy MT scenarios which can be easily mitigated by limiting their power consumption by setting the PL1 limit in BIOS. At the moment the only issue is the price of the platform because even though the CPUs are competitively priced, you need to purchase a quite expensive motherboard, DDR5 RAM (the faster the better) and a decent cooling solution (preferably AIO).

Too many reviewers are fishing for views and ad revenue, so having loud and disparaging headlines which aren't necessarily representative of the real world is their way of achieving that which is quite sad.

Average people are not buying i9s and i7s (especially K ones) anyway, so your conclusion regarding them makes no sense. Furthermore, the fact that current everyday scenarios and games are not utilizing all the CPU cores to their max and as a consequence power draw does not peak all the time sounds like a lame excuse for a poor MT efficiency of stock i7/i9 K models, even though 125W is "enough" to maintain high FPS. I mean, 240W, 240 f****ing watts for a mainstream desktop CPU sounds a bit ridiculous to me, considering that this is a HEDT power territory and the whole PR around that hybrid AL architecture was kind of better power and surface efficiency.

The actual conclusion is that K models are insanely "brute forced" out of the factory and tailored for those, who care only about absolute performance regardless of the power draw. This was the only way to kill ZEN3 in MT, because ZEN3 MT efficiency is still far superior. Also, non-K and T models will be more reasonable choice most likely: cheaper and more efficient.

[numacross]

Say, how exactly is the 'b' important? Are you saying you would have looked the other way if it had been a single Dollar or just a lesser sum? Can you name a sum, which would have been ok? *lol*

It is rather common practice in business, and in political systems, to play favours. If this is done with bribes, exclusive contracts, special offers, shares, lawsuits (and settlements), licenses, or a gentlemen's agreement behind closed doors, does not change what it is - it is an attempt to become successful or to remain successful. However, the form in which it is done can matter for politics and how it gets used in the press. They too like to have success, make money and get votes. To make it about an amount and it being billions is pointless. One can equally question why AMD, after they had gained the right to produce x86 CPUs, then went on to buy ATI, which of course cost billions, only to create an even bigger market share for themselves.

Maybe because Intel has been officially punished by multiple courts of law or other government institutions for their anti-competitive practices?

AMD's problem was that they just could not produce a better x86 CPU, while Intel themselves did not create the best CPUs either, only AMD had the better political position (being the underdog in a dominantly left industry plays strong with voters). The moral is that AMD should have produced better CPUs, and only now they do.

You are either too young to remember, or too ignorant to acknowledge AMD's history with regards to x86. Take a look what happened when AMD started improving on the 286/386 designs they licensed from Intel, or what happened with Athlon or Athlon64/Opteron.

Anyway, I'm done "discussing" this with you.

[leipero]

Not impressed, but price reflects that. Those CPUs will basically be useless in a few years for gaming if existing trend continues as it was in last decade or two, 12600k is already useless in some games. Power consumption, not even going to touch that.

[sdack]

Maybe you're too young to remember what Intel did back in the day, but they were literally paying billions (with a b) in under-the-table deals to all the major OEMs so they wouldn't sell any systems or as few as possible with AMD processors.

Say, how exactly is the 'b' important? Are you saying you would have looked the other way if it had been a single Dollar or just a lesser sum? Can you name a sum, which would have been ok? *lol*

It is rather common practice in business, and in political systems, to play favours. If this is done with bribes, exclusive contracts, special offers, shares, lawsuits (and settlements), licenses, or a gentlemen's agreement behind closed doors, does not change what it is - it is an attempt to become successful or to remain successful. However, the form in which it is done can matter for politics and how it gets used in the press. They too like to have success, make money and get votes. To make it about an amount and it being billions is pointless. One can equally question why AMD, after they had gained the right to produce x86 CPUs, then went on to buy ATI, which of course cost billions, only to create an even bigger market share for themselves.

AMD's problem was that they just could not produce a better x86 CPU, while Intel themselves did not create the best CPUs either, only AMD had the better political position (being the underdog in a dominantly left industry plays strong with voters). The moral is that AMD should have produced better CPUs, and only now they do.

Monsanto however sued countless farmers around the world over their GMO crops, driving them into bankruptcy and suicide. Their chemicals have poisoned countless people. Of course, Monsanto being a big company played favours in business and politics, too, like all other companies, but this is not the issue. The "issue", meaning deaths, Monsanto has caused is obviously a different one and needs no explaining. Then take today's pharma industry and how COVID has created winners and losers in the business. Obviously does hardly anyone care about morals when businesses make billions by saving lifes.